The northern lights, or aurora borealis, appear in the sky over the Bamburgh lighthouse at Stag Rock in Northumberland, England on September 28, 2016. (Photo by Owen Humphreys/PA Wire via ZUMA Press)

The double compound eyes of a male St. Mark's fly (Bibio marci), submitted by Dr. David Maitland from Feltwell, UK. (Dr. David Maitland)

Hemispheric color differences on Saturn's moon Rhea are apparent in this false-color view from NASA's Cassini spacecraft in this March 2, 2010 file photo. (Photo by Reuters/NASA/JPL/SSI)

Most people know Nikon as a purveyor of pro and consumer-grade digital cameras. But the company's expertise with optics bleeds over into related markets – it's one of the science community's major suppliers of microscopes. And each year the company asks the community to send it some of their favorite images of tiny objects. A panel of scientists and journalists have chosen the best of this past year's submissions, which Nikon has placed on its Small World site.

Photo: Honorable Mention. “Snow crystal, illuminated with colored lights (5x)”. (Photo by Dr. Kenneth Libbrecht, California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Department of Physics, Pasadena, California, USA)

An image produced by the Hubble telescope of the perfectly “edge-on” galaxy, or NGC 4013, March 1, 2001. This new Hubble picture reveals, with great detail, huge clouds of dust and gas extending along, as well as far above, the galaxy's main disk. NGC 4013 is a spiral galaxy, similar to the Milky Way, lying some 55 million light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Ursa Major. Viewed face-on, it would look like a nearly circular pinwheel, but NGC 4013 happens to be seen edge-on from our vantage point. Even at 55 million light-years, the galaxy is larger than Hubble's field of view, and the image shows only a little more than half of the object, albeit with unprecedented detail. (Photo Courtesy of NASA/Newsmakers)

Backdropped by a night time view of the Earth and the starry sky, the Space Shuttle Endeavour is seen docked to the International Space Station on May 28, 2011. (Photo by Reuters/NASA)

In this picture made available Thursday July 11, 2013 a zoo-keeper presents three of twelve ferret babies at Eekholt Zoo in Grossenaspe, Germany, Wednesday July 10, 2013. The ferret babies were born May 25, 2013. (Photo by Markus Scholz/AP Photo/Dpa)

Scottish photographer George Logan and retoucher Tony Swinney let’s you imagine what it would be like if your cat wasn’t just a purring ball of fur. As a part of “Big Cat, Small Cat” ad campaign for Whiskas, they created a series of funny images showing tiny domestic cats chasing after antelopes, zebras, elephants and doing other “big cat” stuff.